as it is commonly practiced in trade unions, virtually disappears and an iron discipline takes its place. Workers who venture to start movements among the striking rank and file which tend to destroy the strikes, and that is what the Menshevik and other programs mentioned do to the Russian revolution, soon find themselves in trouble. The difference being that in Russia the fight is incomparably greater and the need for discipline correspondingly keener than in any strike ever waged.
The rigors of the dictatorship have been grossly exaggerated. The fact is that there probably never has been so mild a government during a revolutionary crisis as the one now in control of Russia. It is true that many people have been executed—the Extraordinary Commission accounts for 10,000—but by far the most of them were spies, military deserters, speculators, bandits, and other types of common criminals—few were capitalists or nobles, the two deposed classes. Compared with the wholesale slaughter of workers by capitalists during periods of severe reaction—consider Finland, Hungary, and the Paris Commune—such a total is very small. As for the leaders of the opposition parties, the Mensheviki, Social Revolutionists, and Anarchists, they have come to grief only when they have taken rifles in their hands to assert their principles, or have encouraged others to do so. And then, as a rule, the worst punishment meted out to them was prison sentences. In different parts of the country the Menshevik party waged open war against the Soviet Government, yet its leaders admit that only eleven of of their active workers have been executed since the beginning of the revolution.[1] The Bolsheviki deny having killed even one of them. In the Russian revolution the war parties has been much less bitter than it was during the French revolution.
Although the restrictions of free speech are very severe, as all agree, yet they are by no means as strict as we have been told. Organized opposition to the Government is forbidden, but individuals talk as freely as in any country in the world. A typical case in point: One day a group of us in Moscow were taking a trip
- ↑ Henry Noel Brailsford, "The Russian Workers’ Republic," P. 142.
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